Re: GS hard drive w/ a Mac

[shack@deimos.frii.com (Randy Shackelford)]

In article <19970301182201.NAA09539@ladder02.news.aol.com>,
Midd33 <midd33@aol.com> wrote:

>I still can't get my Performa 6400 to recognize my hard drive from my GS.
>I've tried using PC exchange. It recognizes the actual drive and the id
>number, but nothing else.

If you formatted the hard disk on the IIgs, you don't have a device driver
in the drive's APPLE_DRIVER partition. Even worse, some Apple II formatters
don't even bother making this partition. Furthermore, if you don't have any
HFS volumes on the drive, there are relatively few driver types which would
show your drive since only a few will mount ProDOS volumes.

>Can anyone help?

You're in luck if you have a hard disk with the Apple ROM installed. You can
reformat the drive on the Mac with HD SC setup and partition it with ProDOS
volumes, and the driver it installs will mount those volumes. If you use
version 7.3.5, there is a minor annoyance: the driver partition is named
APPLE_DRIVER43 instead of APPLE_DRIVER, to signify a SCSI Manager 4.3-savvy
device driver. GS/OS doesn't know how to handle this and reports it as an
invalid volume and makes you "eject" it. You can always use an older version
of HD SC setup though. If you do, you have to make HFS volumes and erase them
into ProDOS volumes on the IIgs since older versions won't make ProDOS volumes.
But you don't have the driver to-do with older versions.

If you don't have an Apple-supplied drive, it's a bit more complicated. There
is a patch to make HD SC setup 7.3.5 format non Apple drives, but if you use
it, you get the eject message every time the finder comes up. I don't know if
there are patches for the older versions around any more. But if you only want
the HFS volumes to show up, use any ol' formatter you want and you're ok.

The bottom line is, always format your hard disk on a Mac if you ever want to
use it with a Mac. Otherwise, it gets kinda tough to get it to work.

I discovered these problems while trying to replace my IIgs' 105 mb hard disk
with a 230 mb with Apple ROM on it. I thought it'd be neat to have the ProDOS
volume show up, but I don't like getting the eject message all the time. So
I used the version of HD SC setup from system 7.01 but haven't gotten around
to testing it yet. Just did the reformat-go-round with the gig in my 840AV so
it could have the Apple supplied driver. My guess is if the formatter won't 
let you make ProDOS volumes, the driver won't support them either. Since I'm
not concerned with having ProDOS volumes show up, I may use Transoft SCSI 
Director on the 230 like I have on the 105. It lets the HFS volume show up on
the Mac but not the ProDOS volume. Plenty good for using Norton to maintain
the HFS volume, the only reason I ever have the IIgs hard disk on the Mac.
-- 
Randy Shackelford                                 
shack@frii.com